The Challenge

Having seen our Madeon Adventure Machine, Greenpeace approached us looking for a way to get people from all over the world to proactively contribute to their #SaveTheArctic musical protest. In August 2015, after years of lobbying to Save The Arctic, Greenpeace turned their Arctic drilling protests into one of music. Inspired by the string quartet that famously played as the Titanic went down, Greenpeace commissioned a classical piece of music which was written and performed outside Shell's London offices each day for as long as they continued to drill for oil in the Arctic. The piece of music was called Requiem for Arctic Ice and musicians and celebrity supporters such as Charlotte Church took their turn to perform the musical protest at Shell's London HQ over time.

Our brief was to extend this musical protest taking place by orchestras, celebrities and campaign supporters outside Shell's London HQ in London so that anyone around the world could get involved and to use social media to put more pressure on Shell to pull out of the Arctic.

The idea

Our idea was to take this musical demonstration taking place at Shell's physical doorstep to Shell's digital doorstep through an orchestra played and powered by campaign supporters from around the world.

We created our own algorithm using new web audio APIs that turned the digital actions of supporters into a dynamically composed piece of music that lived online.

We then worked with classical music composers to record a series of complementary instruments, which were then triggered by these digital actions including tweets and messages of protest to Shell's social accounts, petition signatures, site visits or shares.

The result was a real-time and dynamically created musical composition generated by the social support and digital actions of supporters from around the world that would live alongside the physical musical protests taking place in London. For as long as Shell continued to drill in the Arctic we would make ourselves heard online, just as we were in London.

The Requiem website also housed a timeline of content giving people a reason to revisit the website. The timeline featured updates from the demonstrations happening in London, the celebrity supporters, the milestones of support and, ultimately, the news of our campaign and everyone's efforts succeeding.

What happened

The site launched as the first musicians played ‘Requiem for Arctic Ice’ outside Shell’s headquarters as Shell entered the Arctic to start their drilling. Giving the protest a musical focus allowed us to connect with supporters on a much more emotive level. People would stop and listen, both in London and online, letting the Requiem compose music in real time as support for the campaign poured in.

The campaign was featured in numerous online publications including The Guardian and The Huffington Post. Acts of social support that triggered the music generated over 100M impressions on twitter. Shell saw over 30,000 messages of protest posted to their Facebook pages and the website had an average dwell time of over 6 minutes as visitors were drawn into the sounds being created and the feeling of being part of this live global musical protest.

Fuelled by the support, The Requiem for Arctic Ice played for over eight weeks until it came to a crescendo with Shell finally announcing! that they were cancelling their drilling plans and withdrawing from the Arctic.

Throught the power of people we made ourselves heard through music and helped to save the Arctic, and those cute polar bears, together.